The Lipstick Jungle; The ultimate three-girls-in-the-city movie, The Best of Everything, based on Rona Jaffe's wildly popular novel, was a plush, CinemaScope, DeLuxe-color 1950s jewel, with a cast that included a trio of hot ingenues (Peyton Place's Hope Lange, supermodel Suzy Parker, and Diane Baker), plus Joan Crawford, Louis Jourdan, and a slick young Robert Evans.

BYLINE: Laura Jacobs

The genre was a winner for the movies, right from the start. Requirements were minimal: a big city, three pretty faces, some wolves. Sally, Irene and Mary was the first-silent but scrappy in 1925-a tale of three chorus girls looking for love and limelight in New York, New York (one of them was a hungry young actress named Joan Crawford). In Our Blushing Brides, 1930, it was three shopgirls-one of them, again, Joan Crawford. In 1932's Three on a Match, the girls were childhood friends, all grown up and sharing bites of the Big Apple-shiny, wormy-only this time the Joan was blonde, as in Blondell. Throughout the 30s and into the 40s, three-girls-in-the-city had to make room for three-boys-back-from-war. (In those days returning soldiers were as hopeful, as vulnerable, as young women.) Two is just two: left and right, yes and no, Goofus and Gallant. Four is fine for TV-see HBO's Sex and the City-but one too many for film (A Letter to Four Wives was fixed by subtraction: A Letter to Three Wives won the Oscars). Three is destiny. When blushing brides play with matches, one girl wins, one draws, one dies.

Who would have thought the ultimate three-girls-in-the-city flick would premiere not in the flapper-fast 20s, the satin-slouch 30s, or the shoulder-pad 40s, but in the white-glove, bullet-bra 50s? In 1959, with considerable fanfare, Twentieth Century Fox premiered The Best of Everything, a title it took seriously. The movie was in CinemaScope, of course, as were all major Fox films after 1953, and the color was by DeLuxe. Indeed, "deluxe" was the operative word, from the orchestral score, as plush as expensive perfume (Shalimar is the boss's last name), to the running time of 121 minutes (twice that of Three on a Match), to the skyline-and-sidewalk location work that opens the movie up while holding it down to earth (un-deluxing it a little, letting it breathe). The credit sequence alone is a perk, a thrill, a tone poem to arrival, home movies meet Hart Crane. The camera flies in over a hazy Manhattan at dawn, eyes the city from the far side of the East River (a barge floats by), then glides along Park Avenue like a limo with the windows down. The streets are empty, a strange and lovely sight to any New Yorker, then slowly the rush begins, cars in tunnels and curving off ramps, girls coming up subway stairs at Rockefeller Center, girls swinging hatboxes from Bonwit's as they step out of bomb-shaped buses (Fox in the 50s loved buses).

"All that sublime photography of New York that is also so incredibly dull," says fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, host of the 1996 New York screening of The Best of Everything, a revival-reunion sponsored by American Movie Classics. "They just had a really good day and they shot it, at a slightly good angle. And they're all going to work. You see hundreds of people going to work. It's so inspiring."

Not least because it's carried on the voice of young Johnny Mathis-Cognac and cream-who sings the Alfred Newman-

Sammy Cahn title song as if he were hovering between the last longing of the night and the first reverie of the day (sample lyric: "That one little sigh-is treasure / you cannot buy-or measure").

"I loved it," Mathis says of the Oscar-nominated song. "It was absolutely at the beginning. I was living in a broom closet at the Wellington Hotel"-seriously, the manager had put a bed in there-"and I walked to the studio, which was a long way away, but I composed myself as I was walking."